Chapter CLXXVIII: Section 15: Thyrsis studied these people, and measured himself against

them. He was not blinded by any vanity; he knew that it would not have taken him a week to turn out a short story which would have had the requisite qualities for Macintyre’s--which would have been clever and entertaining, would have had genuine sentiment, and as large a proportion of sincerity as the magazine admitted. He could have suggested that he thought it was worth five hundred dollars, and “Billy” Macintyre would have nodded and sent him a check. And then he could have moved up to town, and got a frock-coat, and paid another call upon Mrs. “Parmy” Patton. Then his friend Comings would have put him up for the “Thistle”, he would have got to know the men who made literary opinion, and so his career would have been secure.

Nor need he have made any apparent break with his convictions. In “society” one met all sorts of eccentrics--“babus” and “yogis”, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and theosophists, Fletcherites, vegetarians and “raw-fooders”. And there would be ample room for his fad--it was quite “English” to be touched with Socialism. All that one had to do was to be entertaining in one’s presentation of it, and to confine one’s self to its literary aspects--not setting forth plans for the expropriation of the house of Macintyre!

Thyrsis had one grievous handicap, of course. He would have had to keep his wife and child in the background; for Corydon, alas, would not have scored as a giver of dinner-parties. From a woman like Mrs. Jesse Dyckman, skilled in intellectual fence, and merciless to her inferiors, Corydon would have turned tail and fled. Thyrsis was able to sit by and let Mrs. Dyckman wave the plumes of her wit and spread the tail-feathers of her culture before his astonished eyes, and at the same time occupy his mind with studying her, and working out her “economic interpretation”. But Corydon took life too intensely, and people too personally for that.

But she would have let him go, if he had told her that it was best. So why should he not do it--why should he turn his back upon this opportunity, and return to the “soap-box in a marsh” to wrestle with loneliness and want? The fact of the matter was that the thing which seemed so easy to his intellect, was impossible to his character. Thyrsis could not have anything to do with these people without hypocrisy; merely to sit and talk pleasantly with them was to lie. They were to him the enemy, the thing he was in life to fight. And he hated all that they stood for in the world--he hated their ideas and their institutions, their virtues as well as their vices.

He had been down into the bottom-most pit of hell, and the sights that he had seen there had withered him up. How could he derive enjoyment from silks and jewels, from rich foods and fine wines, when he heard in his ears the cries of agony of the millions he had left behind him in that seething abyss? And should he trample upon their faces, as so many others had trampled? Should he make a ladder of their murdered hopes, to climb out to fame and fortune? Not he!

It seemed to him sometimes, as he thought about it, that he alone, of all men living, had power to voice the despair of these tortured souls. Others had been down into that pit, and had come out alive; but who was there among them that was an _artist;_ that could forge his hatred into a weapon, sharp enough and stout enough to be driven through the tough hide of the world of culture? To be an artist meant to have spent years and decades in toil and study, in disciplining and drilling one’s powers; and who was there that had descended into the social inferno, and had come back with strength enough to accomplish that labor?

So it seemed to him that he was the bearer of a gospel, that he had to teach the world something it could otherwise not know. He had tried out upon his own person, and upon the persons of his loved ones, the effects of poverty and destitution, of cold and hunger, of solitude and sickness and despair. And so he knew, of his own knowledge, the meaning of the degradation that he saw in modern society--of suicide and insanity, of drunkenness and vice and crime, of physical and mental and moral decay. He knew, and none could dispute him! Therefore he must nerve himself for the struggle; he must deliver that message, and pound home that truth. He must keep on and on--in defiance of authority, in the face of all the obloquy and ridicule that the prostitute powers of civilization could heap upon him. He must live for that work, and die for it--to make real to the thinking world the infamies and the horrors of the capitalist _régime_.